Encouraging the young is key to creating entrepreneurs
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
This can actually be a good thing. A person becomes able to take on more difficult challenges if they are trained with smaller ones steadily. In fact, if you learn how to take risks early in life, you learn to stretch yourself appropriately and succeed in handling bigger risks more successfully than you ever thought you would.
Felix Dennis, the publishing magnate, makes a similar point in his book, “How to Get Rich”, which a friend gave me for summer reading. It is a scream, and I highly recommend it. Dennis is heavily biased towards youth and starting out on your entrepreneurial journey early in life.
Nothing to Lose
Like the old Dylan song, having nothing to lose is a huge driver for working obsessively as an entrepreneur. Dennis catalogues many of the people he’s known in his life who he claims were smarter than him, but who had accumulated family, possessions, and got to age 40, and couldn’t risk it all on a venture.
Does this mean if you’re over 40 you’re confined to a life of wage slavery? No, but it does mean something important for how we raise our children. We should encourage their early commercial and creative tendencies. They will have enormous stamina and boldness in their twenties.
A number of young entrepreneurs I met while I was running First Tuesday, a network of entrepreneurs, from 1998 to 2000 were on their first venture in their 20s. They were great people, but relatively unexceptional in what they achieved. But they were on training wheels. In the downturn of 2002 to 2004, they kept at it, and emerged as serious business people.
Ordinary people do extraordinary things – they just keep persisting when others give up, and in the keeping on, sometimes achieve exceptional results.
Persistence is Key
I first met Toby Rowland, CEO of King.com, an online gaming company, when he was the co-founder of ClickMango. I believe they met their funders at a First Tuesday event in August 2000, and secured funding within 8 days. The company folded later, but Toby founded King.com in the downturn, and has built a very solid and successful business.
Brent Hoberman, the founder of lastminute.com, and now MyDeco, has said that if he and Martha had known everything that they didn’t know about travel, then they never would have started lastminute.com. Some of us may never become a Mark Zuckerberg who at age 24 runs Facebook valued at $15bn. But if we get comfortable with the cycle of building businesses at an early age, failing, dusting ourselves off, and trying again, and celebrating the mini successes of those who achieve in their 20s, we will see more Zuckerbergs rising out of the UK. They are here –probably creating hell for their parents. Let them fly
Julie Meyer is CEO of Ariadne Capital